Many efforts are known to produce a vehicle that travels along a support surface such as the ground without applying a rotational force upon wheels of the vehicle in contact with the ground. Such vehicles are sought for a variety of purposes, including the simple novelty, or toy-like entertainment value of an innovative or unusual vehicle, as well as a desire for possibly robotic vehicles to travel over uneven terrain that circular wheels cannot ordinarily traverse, for such things as remote exploration or land mine detecting, as well as for micro machines that cannot be manufactured with the usual complexity of their macroscopic counterparts, etc. For example, a gyrostat propulsion system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,090,260 to Delroy, and includes rotational spin of two gyrostats secured within a frame to produce precessional forces upon the frame to thereby move the frame. Delroy, however, is extraordinarily complex, and therefore too costly to achieve any valuable function.
Additional attempts to directly convert the traditional rotational force of motors to linear motion are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,884,465 to Zachystal which uses a spinning weight that rotates within a frame that supports opposed, extending legs. Similarly, a “walking vehicle” is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,662,465 to Stewart, wherein use of rotation between two separate, but linked bodies is utilized with alternate lifting of the bodies through overlapping pairs of flexible legs that support the approximately co-axial bodies in order to move the vehicle over uneven terrain. A much older effort is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,886,976 to Dean, that shows use of opposed, eccentric rotating weights to generate a controlled linear motion. More recently, U.S. Pat. No. 4,834,200 to Kajita shows use of shifting a center of gravity to produce movement of a pair of legs that support an erect body, much like a human-like robot, in an effort to move the robot over steps, and similar uneven terrain.
All of these and other known efforts to produce a vehicle that propels itself without a rotational force applied directly to circular wheels, or directly to drive wheels such as in tracked vehicles, involve extraordinarily complex apparatus that would be very costly to manufacture. Perhaps more importantly, known efforts have not been successful at engaging rough terrain and have not produced an efficient use of the rotational force, compared to traditional, circular wheeled vehicles. Accordingly, there is a need for a vehicle that can propel itself by way of an efficient use of force that is not mechanically linked to rotation of circular wheels supporting and moving the vehicle.